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How we make product decisions

Ghost is a small, bootstrapped non-profit organization with no external funding. We make revenue from our Ghost(Pro) platform, which sustains the company and funds a handful of developers who improve the software. Because we don’t have tens of millions of dollars in VC money or hundreds of developers, we have to carefully choose where to dedicate our limited team and resources. We can’t do everything. When deciding what to do next, we try to look at what would benefit most users, in most ways, most of the time. You can get a sense of those things over on our public changelog. Outside of the core team, Ghost is completely open source, so anyone in the world can contribute and help build a feature that they’d like to see in the software, even if the core team isn’t working on it.

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Feature requests

We welcome feature requests from users over in the ideas category of the Ghost Forum. Here, people can request and suggest things which they’d like to see in Ghost, and others can add their votes. The ideas board is a great way for us to gauge user demand, but it’s not a democratic system. We don’t automatically build things just because they get a lot of votes, and not everything that gets requested makes it into core, but we do pay close attention to things with lots of demand.

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Why haven’t you built X yet? When will you?

Based on how we make product decisions, and what feature requests we get (detailed above) — if neither the core team nor the wider community are building the thing you want, then it’s likely that there isn’t enough demand or interest to make it happen at the moment. But, the great thing about open source is that if enough people want something, they can easily get together on GitHub and make it happen themselves (or fund someone else to). There’s no need to wait on the core team to deliver it. If you really want or need a particular feature, it’s entirely possible to make that happen. You can get involved, either by contributing your time and development skills, or by providing financial support to fund someone with these skills.

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I’m very upset you aren’t doing what I want!

For the most part, the Ghost community is kind and understanding of the complexities and constraints of building modern software. Every so often, though, we get a series of comments along the lines of:
Wow, I can’t believe this is broken and nobody is doing anything. How have you messed up something so basic? Can the devs fix ASAP. Thanks.
Comments like this don’t inspire anyone to help you. Not the core team, and certainly not the wider group of volunteer contributors. If you’re friendly and polite, other will typically be friendly in return. If you feel really passionate about something specific, you have 3 potential courses of action:
  1. Get involved on GitHub and contribute code to fix the issue
  2. Hire a developer to get involved on GitHub and contribute code to fix the issue
  3. Start a feature request topic on the forum to demonstrate that lots of other users care about this too, and have voted on it, which is the most likely way the core team will prioritize it.

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Is there a public roadmap for what’s coming next?

The Ghost core team maintains a broad 1-2 year product roadmap at any given time, which defines the overall direction of the company and the software. While the exact roadmap isn’t shared publicly (we tried it and it turned out to be more distracting than helpful), the things being worked on are generally very visible on GitHub.